Print shops generally include high-speed printers used for volume printing. These printers may be capable of printing thousands of pages of content per minute or more. A typical print shop includes multiple production printing systems (e.g., continuous-forms printers). The production printing systems mark a print medium such as paper. When printed content is produced at a high volume, it may be necessary to print batches of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of documents on a regular basis.
In order to provide a desired level of quality, production printing systems include printheads having rows of precisely spaced nozzles for ejecting ink drops onto the print medium. If the spacing between rows of nozzles is not optimized, print quality may be degraded. This typically requires alignment of nozzles so that the printed drops are equally spaced when jetted onto a print medium. Since a row of nozzles is housed within one physical printhead, alignment involves adjusting a rotation or lateral position of the printhead. At a high level, optimal quality is achieved when the printed drops (pels) are accurately located on an ideal square printer grid, where the printer grid is defined as a square lattice of equally spaced points having spacing between lattice points of one divided by the Dots Per Inch (DPI) of the printer. Thus, operators of print shops, to obtain the high image quality that their customers demand, desire accurate alignment of the rows of nozzles in production printers. For at least these reasons, print shop operators continue to seek out enhanced techniques for performing and measuring printhead alignment.